News

Anyone who’s been out and about in Dubai at 12 am for the last two years as the New Year ticked over, you’d have seen that the unusually-heavy traffic at the time comes to a standstill all over the city as soon as the celebratory Burj Khalifa fireworks begin. Apparently now your car will be impounded if you stop on a major highway to watch the 2013 show.

Honda has revealed some new models that they plan to release in the near future at the 2013 Tokyo Auto Salon. Ironically, one of the “concept” cars to be displayed includes a Honda S2000 with a daft body kit, which originally stopped production in 2008.

The 2013 Nissan Sentra will be hitting showrooms in the UAE very soon. It is not a replacement for the new sub-compact Nissan Sunny, but will slot in alongside it as a compact sedan offering, effectively replacing the older Nissan Sunny.

It’s weird that, aside from a brief look at our scribe Vivek Menon’s Mazda 6, we’ve never had a go with any Mazda models before. All we kept hearing about was how Mazdas handled well and all that, but we never took it seriously, especially since the local dealers did not have a media test-drive programme in place. So when we got the call offering us the fresh Mazda CX-5 for a proper test, we were actually sort of excited.

Our previous-generation 2009 Renault Safrane V6 has been a reliable-enough car, but certain interior parts had prematurely worn out in just 2 years — a sign of cost-cutting if there ever was one. So we asked for those parts to be replaced under warranty.

There is a massive recall underway for several General Motors models in the UAE, including the Chevrolet Aveo, Captiva, Epica, Optra and GMC Terrain, between model-years 2007 and 2010. It was quietly announced by the UAE’s Ministry of Economy in an Arabic statement, which is why it flew under the radar.